We arrived at the hut occupied by this family at noon. It stands on the bank of the river, half a mile above the village of Chehalis, and as we pulled up, two old and two young squaws and nine small Indians, some of them mere papooses in arms (but not in long clothes--in fact, not in any clothes worth mentioning), came swarming out to meet us. Their abode was a shanty about twelve feet square, made by setting four corner posts into the ground, nailing cross-ribs on, and over these clapboards riven from the native cedars, and the roof was of the same material. The adult members of this social alliance had been engaged in catching and drying salmon during the recent run; the heads, entrails and backbones of which had been dumped into the river at their very door. There being no current near the shore they had sunk in barely enough water to cover them, and lay there rotting and poluting the water used by the family for drinking and cooking. Cart-loads of this offal were also lying about the dooryard, and had been trampled into and mixed up with the mud until the whole outfit stunk like a tanyard.
Within was a picture of filth and squalor that beggars description. The floor of the hut was of mother earth. A couple of logs with two clapboards laid across them formed the only seats. On one side was a pile of brush, hay, and dirty, filthy blankets, indiscriminately mixed, on which the entire three families slept, presumably in the same fashion. Near the centre of the hut a small fire struggled for existence, and that portion of the smoke that was not absorbed by the people, the drying fish and other objects in the room, escaped through a hole in the centre of the roof. The children, barefooted and half-naked, came in out of the rain, mud, and fish carrion, in which they had been tramping about, and sat or lay on the ground about the fire, looking as happy as a litter of pigs in a mud hole. On poles, attached by cedar withes to the rafters, were hung several hundred salmon, absorbing smoke, carbonic acid gas from the lungs of the human beings beneath, and steam from the cooking that was going on. It is understood that after this process has been prolonged for some weeks these once noble fishes will be fit for the winter food of the Siwash.